Jury: Lori Drew not guilty of criminal conspiracy, but faces prison time

In one of the best-known recent cases involving both social networking and the criminal law, Lori Drew, a 49-year-old mother, was convicted in a Los Angeles federal court last week in on misdemeanor charges of accessing computers without authorization. Drew's sham assumption of the persona of a teenage boy, and subsequent online humiliation of 13 - year - old Megan Meier, led to Meier's hanging herself in response to Drew's increasingly cruel taunting. She was acquitted of murder charges, and the judge will soon be considering sentencing as well as post-trial motions.

Naturally many blogs are carrying discussions of the issues, and some of the more interesting commentaries appear to include Volokh Conspiracy, Death by a Thousand Papercuts, Faultline USA, Blown to Bits and GigaOM.

What is the blogger legal angle on the prosecution, the verdict and the issues? Obviously bloggers as bloggers have every possible opinion on the matter. From a legal point of view, while the case did not involve blogging, it did nonetheless involve online social networking and implicate issues of online harassment, the use of the Internet by children and the abuse of adult-child online Interaction, as well as so far relatively unexamined issues of third-party responsibility for what happened, supervision of a child's online activities and the obvious question of how a child can can get to this point emotionally without her parents becoming aware and intervening.

Bloggers are, as a rule, not particularly interested in seeing online activities become the basis for criminal liability, but at the same time their interest in blogging is premised on the idea that online communication and the relationships developed among people who interact only via the Internet matter a lot, mean a lot, and are very real. There is understandable concern among many online commentators about the implications of the particular legal theories that formed the basis of the convictions, based fundamentally on the violation of various levels of online terms of service that are seldom more than glanced at and clicked through by experienced Internet users.

The MBA encourages responsible use of the online resources via its Statement of Principles, to which each member must agree to adhere. These do not and cannot govern all online interaction, but they are one starting point to consider the proper role of responsibility, accountability and good citizenship for anyone projecting his or her personality and words into cyberspace.